Prior art telephone answering and message recording equipment has existed in two basic forms. Answering services such as doctors use are one example. While answering services fill a need they have shortcomings. They utilize human operators which are relatively expensive and the service cannot be enabled and disabled quickly and simply. In addition, calls cannot be automatically forwarded to another telephone at the option of the user of the service.
Equipment in the form of telephone answering machines with prerecorded announcements and the ability to record messages are also known. However, this approach requires an answering and recording system per telephone set which is very expensive and they require a lot of maintenance. In addition, such systems do not alternatively forward calls to another telephone set. Further, an indication of a recorded message is provided for every answered call whether or not there are actually any recorded messages. The recording, usually magnetic tape, must be played to actually determine if there are any recorded messages. Due to these shortcomings such telephone answering and recording machines have found limited acceptance and use in large office environments although they have wider acceptance in small business and residential use.
Some telephone companies have more recently been providing a telephone answering and message recording service. A telephone company customer may enable or disable the feature at will. A description of the equipment providing this service is found in "New Customer Calling Services", by Bruce I. Hanson et al, Bell Laboratories Record, Vol. 58, No. 6, June 1980 which is incorporated herein by reference. This equipment suffers some basic shortcomings. It is not readily apparent to the telephone set user whether or not the service is in effect for their telephone because there is no continuous visual/audible indication of the service. In addition, when messages are recorded the only way the telephone user knows of their existence is by picking up the handset and listening to the dial tone which is interrupted to indicate a message has been recorded. Also, this service does not alternatively provide for transfer of incoming calls to another telephone set at the option of the user.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an inexpensive and simple automatic telephone answering and message recording system that the user knows at a glance is enabled or disabled, that provides a visual indication of the existence of recorded messages, and that does not require recording and playback equipment at each telephone set.